Guitar talk
Interesting interview in the FT with the African guitarist Lionel Loueke, if you like to think about learning and certification, a couple of truths. The first is how technology can help. ‘Slow it down’ has helped many of us. Being able to record yourself, and then listen ( a point Eric Clapton talks about) is an interesting example of how you blur the gap between private practice and the external ear provided by a teacher.
He first heard jazz when a friend played him cassettes by Wes Montgomery and George Benson. At first, Loueke didn’t even know that jazz was an improvised music. ‘I approached it like I was playing Afropop, and learnt it by ear,’ he says. ‘I slowed down the cassette by putting in weak batteries, then back to electricity to get the speed. That’s how I started jazz”.
And of course, certification has its limits, and the ‘place to learn’ in not always in the classroom. Papert’s ‘mathland’, revisited.
When guitarist Lionel Loueke was a teenager in Benin, boiling precious guitar strings in vinegar to make them last, he didn’t think that one day he’d be auditioning in Los Angeles for a place at the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz Performance. Or that the panel of jazz professors would include Wayne Shorter, Terence Blanchard and Herbie Hancock. And certainly not that Hancock would exclaim, ‘How about we just forget about the school and I take you on the road right now?’